Last week I was speaking to a room of 300 HR leaders in Helsinki, and told them something that changed the way some of them were thinking.

Turbulence isn’t a temporary problem to manage until things settle down.

It’s the operating system - and I believe it always has been. If you’re waiting for conditions to stabilise before you lead strategically, you’re going to be waiting a long time.

When I’ve put something close to this to a room before, the response is always the same - most people are still holding on to the idea that things will settle down. What I’ve noticed every time isn’t the idea itself - it’s how many people are still waiting for the turbulence to pass.

The instinct, when everything is turbulent, is to react faster, to treat every signal as urgent, to move.

I believe that instinct is exactly what gets in the way.

Urgency and importance are not the same thing.

In most organisations though, they get treated as if they are - and usually this happens without anyone realising until the cost becomes hard to ignore.

Urgency is loud. It arrives in emails marked high priority, in phone calls that interrupt your thinking, in deadlines that appear from nowhere. It makes people move fast, and moving fast feels like progress.

Importance is much more subtle. It is direction, it is people, it is the decisions that don’t need to be made today but will shape the next three years. Importance doesn’t announce itself. It just sits there waiting to be noticed and leaders who can’t distinguish between the two spend their careers reacting rather than leading - not because they lack capability, but because the noise became their compass.

What this looks like on the flight deck

In aviation, moments of genuine time-criticality arrive without warning. Weather changes (although that is more predictable it still happens), a system fails, air traffic control reroutes you, a wildcat strike is declared….you need to act, and you need to “rush carefully”.

We are trained not to rush so even then - especially then - the first move is to slow your thinking down before you speed anything else up.

Rushing feels productive, and it almost always makes things worse.

The question we ask is deceptively simple: what matters right now?

Fly the plane.

Aviate, Navigate, Communicate. In that order. Not everything at once, not everything immediately - the most important thing first, then the next, then the next.

That discipline doesn’t come from instinct. It comes from training, from habit, from clarity that was built long before the pressure arrived, and it’s available to anyone willing to do that work - in a cockpit or a boardroom.

When pressure increases, the job isn’t to move fastest. It’s to create clarity about what matters now, what matters next, and what can wait.

Busy is not the same as effective

Many organisations are extraordinarily busy. Calendars full, meetings back to back, decisions being made constantly, people working very hard - or looking as if they are working hard…

The problem is that when you look closely, sometimes the busyness exists precisely because no one has decided what actually matters most, or how to fly the plane, so everything gets treated as urgent.

Everything becomes a priority, everyone looks and feels like they are working hard - but not necessarily moving forward.

I’ve seen this in both the cockpit and in boardrooms. Unchecked urgency doesn’t create progress, it creates velocity without direction and velocity without direction looks impressive right up until you check the fuel gauge and realise you are running on vapours.

Things get started - because that looks like progress - but very little gets finished well - or finished at all.

Clarity is what creates momentum, not activity. A clear organisation often looks calmer, even quieter, from the outside but it usually moves much faster in the long run, because everyone is pulling in the same direction.

What clarity actually means

Clarity isn’t certainty. You can’t always have complete information - in fact I would argue that we never have a full set of facts - but you can always have clear intent.

In flying, that means knowing the priority in this moment: safe aircraft, situational awareness, communication. Everything else falls beneath those three, in that order.

In leadership, clarity sounds like this: “This is what we know. This is what we don’t. And this is what we’ll do while we find out.”

It is direction without pretending to have all the answers - and people don’t need perfect certainty to move forward. They need enough direction to act with confidence. When you can give them that, urgency becomes energy rather than anxiety.

This is one of the most important, and most misunderstood, parts of the role. Leaders don’t just make decisions, they create clarity - they know how to fly the plane - which direction, what the priorities are, what success looks like, and crucially, what they are not doing.

When leaders don’t create that clarity, organisations create noise instead. People start guessing, they build their own priorities, decisions get pushed upwards, everything feels harder than it should.

Clarity reduces friction. Noise creates friction, and one of the most valuable things a leader can do isn’t to add more, it’s to remove the confusion that’s already there.

Dial-Emma: When you’re under pressure to decide

This section appears in every issue: a real-world situation that comes up again and again, and a way of thinking it through that brings you back to centreline.

Scenario

“I’m an HR director. I want to be at the strategy table - I know I should be there - but every time I try to lift my head up, something operational pulls me back down. I spend most of my week reacting. How do I change the conversation about what HR is actually for?”

This one came up in Helsinki, in different forms, more than once, and it’s not an HR problem it’s a clarity problem wearing an HR costume.

The reason operational urgency keeps winning isn’t because strategy is less important. It’s because operational problems are visible, immediate, and loud. Strategic contribution is quieter, it takes longer to emerge, and in the absence of a clear frame for what you’re there to do, the loudest thing in the room always wins.

Here’s a change worth making.

Stop waiting to be invited into the strategy conversation and start arriving with the questions that belong there. Not “how do we implement this?” but “what are we assuming about our people that might not be true in twelve months?” Not “how do we resource this?” but “what does this decision require of the culture, and is the culture ready?” Those questions signal a different seat at the table and they’re yours to ask, whether you’ve been invited or not.

Name your own centreline out loud. What are the two or three things that only you and your function can see from where you sit? Make those visible, consistently, to the people setting direction, as one of the people who is guiding it - not as a report, but from the perspective of someone who has all that human data at their fingertips.

Then when something operational lands on your desk, ask one question before you catch it: is this mine to solve, or mine to redirect? HR leaders (and all leaders) who are genuinely strategic don’t do less, they’re just much clearer about what they’re for.

You are not a passenger in operational turbulence. You are a co-pilot. The difference isn’t seniority - it’s how you think about your seat.

A final thought

In aviation, we talk about staying ahead of the aircraft which means thinking one step beyond what’s happening now. When you fall behind it, everything feels urgent, there’s no space to lead, only to respond with a head full of noise and sometimes panic because you know you are clinging to the tail plane with your fingertips.

Leadership is exactly the same.

Without shared clarity, an organisation starts chasing the present instead of shaping it.

Urgency will always exist. Pressure will always exist. Turbulence - as I told the room in Helsinki - is not a season, it’s the terrain. The question was never how to avoid it - it was always how to fly well within it.

Urgency gets you off the ground.

Clarity keeps you in the air.

If this resonated, forward it to someone leading through uncertainty this month and ask them: are they flying urgently, or flying clearly?

I work with leaders and organisations to apply this kind of thinking to live, high-stakes decisions when everything is noisy and clarity matters most. If this sounds like something your next event needs, let’s explore working together.

No pressure or obligation. Just a place to think clearly.

Clarity vs Urgency